By Arthur Davis

Storylandia 17 features eight tales of dark fantasy, horror and the surreal by American writer Arthur Davis. “The Man From Lahr” is a tale of magical realism as a New York psychiatrist is visited after-hours in his office by a mysterious stranger who has traveled from Eastern Europe with an unlikely tale, and an even more improbable truth. “Dining With The Devil” holds us transfixed as the incarnation of evil reveals the ancient promise on which he has come to collect, and the extraordinary dish on which he has travel so far to feast. A foggy, chilly night on a dangerous road is the setting for “Cara’s Curve,” a narrative of regrets, doubts, confessions and the discovery of a dead man whose reach quickly claims an innocent soul. “A Sly And Knowing Grin,” interweaves the macabre with science fiction as strangers in a bookstore are presented with a horror that tests their fears and overwhelms their ability to cope. In a time-honored misadventure of the mind, “The Unwelcome Guest,” spins a fishing tale of horror that blurs the boundaries between reason and magical realism in a cross between Rieux’s rat-obsessed isolation in Camus’s “The Plague” and Samsa’s transformation in Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Shrouded in sheets of black gossamer, “Dionaea Muscipula’s” dead bodies lie in the street of a deserted town in Maine in this surreal puzzle warning that death “be not the noble path of wise and aged men.” “I Have Become The Leopard” takes the reader on a haunting journey through the mind, heart and soul of a leopard, exposing instincts and consciousness that drives Africa’s most solitary big cat. In a direct-address monologue, “The Cracked Goblet’s” narrator leads his friend through the English countryside in search of an abandoned mansion in this intellectual thriller with the troubling neurosis of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and the unfathomable paranoia of “The Twilight Zone.”